by Don DeLillo
“Very good,” Bing said. “But first tell us how you got Azamanian.”
I went up to my room. Bloomberg was asleep, on his belly, snoring softly into the pillow. He was absolutely enormous. It was easy to imagine him attached to the bed by guy-wires, to be floated aloft once a year like a Macy’s balloon. His full name was Anatole Bloomberg and he played left tackle on offense. That was all I knew about him, that plus the fact that he wasn’t a Texan. One of the outcasts, I thought. Or a voluntary exile of the philosophic type. I decided to wake him up.
“Anatole,” I said. “It’s Gary Harkness, your new roommate. Let’s shake hands and be friends.”
“We’re roommates,” he said. “Why do we have to be friends?”
“It’s just an expression. I didn’t mean undying comrades. Just friends as opposed to enemies. I’m sorry I woke you up.”
“I wasn’t asleep.”
“You were snoring,” I said.
“That’s the way I breathe when I’m on my stomach. What happened to my original roommate?”
“John Billy? John Billy’s been moved.”
“Was that his name?”
“He’s been moved. I hope you’re not tense about my showing up. All I want to do is get off to a good start and avoid all possible tension.”
“Who in your opinion was the greater man?” Bloomberg said. “Edward Gibbon or Archimedes?”
“Archimedes.”
“Correct,” he said.
In the morning Creed sent us into an all-out scrimmage with a brief inspirational message that summed up everything we knew or had to know.
“It’s only a game,” he said, “but it’s the only game.”
Taft Robinson and I were the setbacks. Taft caught a flare pass, evaded two men and went racing down the sideline. Bobby Iselin, a cornerback, gave up the chase at the 25. Bobby used to be the team’s fastest man.
4
THROUGH ALL OUR DAYS together my father returned time and again to a favorite saying.
“Suck in that gut and go harder.”
He never suggested that this saying of his ranked with the maxims of Teddy Roosevelt. Still, he was dedicated to it. He believed in the idea that a simple but lasting reward, something just short of a presidential handshake, awaited the extra effort, the persevering act of a tired man. Backbone, will, mental toughness, desire — these were his themes, the qualities that insured success. He was a pharmaceutical salesman with a lazy son.
It seems that wherever I went I was hounded by people urging me to suck in my gut and go harder. They would never give up on me — my father, my teachers, my coaches, even a girl friend or two. I was a challenge, I guess: a piece of string that does not wish to be knotted. My father was by far the most tireless of those who tried to give me direction, to sharpen my initiative, to piece together some collective memory of hard-won land or dusty struggles in the sun. He put a sign in my room.
WHEN THE GOING GETS TOUGH
THE TOUGH GET GOING
I looked at this sign for three years (roughly from ages fourteen to seventeen) before I began to perceive a certain beauty in it. The sentiment of course had small appeal but it seemed that beauty flew from the words themselves, the letters, consonants swallowing vowels, aggression and tenderness, a semi-self-re-creation from line to line, word to word, letter to letter. All meaning faded. The words became pictures. It was a sinister thing to discover at such an age, that words can escape their meanings. A strange beauty that sign began to express.
My father had a territory and a company car. He sold vitamins, nutritional supplements, mineral preparations and antibiotics. His customers included about fifty doctors and dentists, about a dozen pharmacies, a few hospitals, some drug wholesalers. He had specific goals, both geographic and economic, each linked with the other, and perhaps because of this he hated waste of any kind, of shoe leather, talent, irretrievable time. (Get cracking. Straighten out. Hang in.) It paid, in his view, to follow the simplest, most pioneer of rhythms — the eternal work cycle, the blood-hunt for bear and deer, the mellow rocking of chairs as screen doors swing open and bang shut in the gathering fragments of summer’s sulky dusk. Beyond these honest latitudes lay nothing but chaos.
He had played football at Michigan State. He had ambitions on my behalf and more or less at my expense. This is the custom among men who have failed to be heroes; their sons must prove that the seed was not impoverished. He had spent his autumn Saturdays on the sidelines, watching others fall in battle and rise then to the thunder of the drums and the crowd’s demanding chants. He put me in a football uniform very early. Then, as a high school junior, I won all-state honors at halfback. (This was the first of his ambitions and as it turned out the only one to be fulfilled.) Eventually I received twenty-eight offers of athletic scholarships — tuition, books, room and board, fifteen dollars a month. There were several broad hints of further almsgiving. Visions were painted of lovely young ladies with charitable instincts of their own. It seemed that every section of the country had much to offer in the way of scenery, outdoor activities, entertainment, companionship, and even, if necessary, education. On the application blanks, I had to fill in my height, my weight, my academic average and my time for the 40-yard dash.
I handed over a letter of acceptance to Syracuse University. I was eager to enrich their tradition of great running backs. They threw me out when I barricaded myself in my room with two packages of Oreo cookies and a girl named Lippy Margolis. She wanted to hide from the world and I volunteered to help her. For a day and a night we read to each other from a textbook on economics. She seemed calmed by the incoherent doctrines set forth on those pages. When I was sure I had changed the course of her life for the better, I opened the door.
At Penn State, the next stop, I studied hard and played well. But each day that autumn was exactly like the day before and the one to follow. I had not yet learned to appreciate the slowly gliding drift of identical things; chunks of time spun past me like meteorites in a universe predicated on repetition. For weeks the cool clear weather was unvarying; the girls wore white knee-high stockings; a small red plane passed over the practice field every afternoon at the same time. There was something hugely Asian about those days in Pennsylvania. I tripped on the same step on the same staircase on three successive days. After this I stopped going to practice. The freshman coach wanted to know what was up. I told him I knew all the plays; there was no reason to practice them over and over; the endless repetition might be spiritually disastrous; we were becoming a nation devoted to human xerography. He and I had a long earnest discussion. Much was made of my talent and my potential value to the varsity squad. Oneness was stressed — the oneness necessary for a winning team. It was a good concept, oneness, but I suggested that, to me at least, it could not be truly attractive unless it meant oneness with God or the universe or some equally redoubtable super-phenomenon. What he meant by oneness was in fact elevenness or twenty-twoness. He told me that my attitude was all wrong. People don’t go to football games to see pass patterns run by theologians. He told me, in effect, that I would have to suck in my gut and go harder. (1) A team sport. (2) The need to sacrifice. (3) Preparation for the future. (4) Microcosm of life.
“You’re saying that what I learn on the gridiron about sacrifice and oneness will be of inestimable value later on in life. In other words if I give up now I’ll almost surely give up in the more important contests of the future.”
“That’s it exactly, Gary.”
“I’m giving up,” I said.
It was a perverse thing to do — go home and sit through a blinding white winter in the Adirondacks. I was passing through one of those odd periods of youth in which significance is seen only on the blankest of walls, found only in dull places, and so I thought I’d turn my back to the world and to my father’s sign and try to achieve, indeed establish, some lowly form of American sainthood. The repetition of Penn State was small stuff compared to that deep winter. For five months I did
nothing and then repeated it. I had breakfast in the kitchen, lunch in my room, dinner at the dinner table with the others, meaning my parents. They concluded that I was dying of something slow and incurable and that I did not wish to tell them in order to spare their feelings. This was an excellent thing to infer for all concerned. My father took down the sign and hung in its place a framed photo of his favorite pro team, the Detroit Lions — their official team picture. In late spring, a word appeared all over town. MILITARIZE. The word was printed on cardboard placards that stood in shop windows. It was scrawled on fences. It was handwritten on loose-leaf paper taped to the windshields of cars. It appeared on bumper stickers and sign-boards.
I had accomplished nothing all those months and so I decided to enroll at the University of Miami. It wasn’t a bad place. Repetition gave way to the beginnings of simplicity. (A preparation thus for Texas.) I wanted badly to stay. I liked playing football and I knew that by this time I’d have trouble finding another school that would take me. But I had to leave. It started with a book, an immense volume about the possibilities of nuclear war — assigned reading for a course I was taking in modes of disaster technology. The problem was simple and terrible: I enjoyed the book. I liked reading about the deaths of tens of millions of people. I liked dwelling on the destruction of great cities. Five to twenty million dead. Fifty to a hundred million dead. Ninety percent population loss. Seattle wiped out by mistake. Moscow demolished. Airbursts over every SAC base in Europe. I liked to think of huge buildings toppling, of firestorms, of bridges collapsing, survivors roaming the charred countryside. Carbon 14 and strontium 90. Escalation ladder and subcrisis situation. Titan, Spartan, Poseidon. People burned and unable to breathe. People being evacuated from doomed cities. People diseased and starving. Two hundred thousand bodies decomposing on the roads outside Chicago. I read several chapters twice. Pleasure in the contemplation of millions dying and dead. I became fascinated by words and phrases like thermal hurricane, overkill, circular error probability, post-attack environment, stark deterrence, dose-rate contours, kill-ratio, spasm war. Pleasure in these words. They were extremely effective, I thought, whispering shyly of cycles of destruction so great that the language of past world wars became laughable, the wars themselves somewhat naive. A thrill almost sensual accompanied the reading of this book. What was wrong with me? Had I gone mad? Did others feel as I did? I became seriously depressed. Yet I went to the library and got more books on the subject. Some of these had been published well after the original volume and things were much more up-to-date. Old weapons vanished. Megatonnage soared. New concepts appeared — the rationality of irrationality, hostage cities, orbital attacks. I became more fascinated, more depressed, and finally I left Coral Gables and went back home to my room and to the official team photo of the Detroit Lions. It seemed the only thing to do. My mother brought lunch upstairs. I took the dog for walks.
In time the draft board began to get interested. I allowed my father to get in touch with a former classmate of his, an influential alumnus of Michigan State. Negotiations were held and I was granted an interview with two subalterns of the athletic department, types familiar to football and other paramilitary complexes, the square-jawed bedrock of the corporation. They knew what I could do on the football field, having followed my high school career, but they wouldn’t accept me unless I could convince them that I was ready to take orders, to pursue a mature course, to submit my will to the common good. I managed to convince them. I went to East Lansing the following autumn, an aging recruit, and was leading the freshman squad in touchdowns, yards gained rushing, and platitudes. Then, in a game against the Indiana freshmen, I was one of three players converging on a safetyman who had just intercepted a pass. We seemed to hit him simultaneously. He died the next day and I went home that evening.
I stayed in my room for seven weeks this time, shuffling a deck of cards. I got to the point where I could cut to the six of spades about three out of five times, as long as I didn’t try it too often, abuse the gift, as long as I tried only when I truly felt an emanation from the six, when I knew in my fingers that I could cut to that particular card.
Then I got a phone call from Emmett Creed. Two days later he flew up to see me. I liked the idea of losing myself in an obscure part of the world. And I had discovered a very simple truth. My life meant nothing without football.
5
RAYMOND TOON STOOD six feet seven. He was a mild young man, totally unintimidating, a former bible student. He was a reserve tackle on defense and he had come here because it was the only school he knew of that offered a course in sportscasting.
“Time-adjusted rate of return,” he said. “Redundant asset method. Capital budgeting. Probable stream of earnings. Independently negotiated credit balances. Consolidation. Tax anticipation notes.”
We were in the cafeteria. John Jessup was also at our table, reading a textbook. Jessup and Toon were roommates. Jessup didn’t like the arrangement because Raymond practiced his sportscasting in the room all weekend. When he wasn’t studying theories of economic valuation, he was camped in front of his portable TV set. He’d switch it on, turn the sound down to nothing, and describe the action. At this time of year it was mainly baseball, golf, bowling and stock car racing. Jessup had complained to Rolf Hauptfuhrer that he was being driven out of his mind. But so far nothing had been done. Moody Kimbrough brought his tray over to our table.
“This milk is putrid,” Jessup told him.
“What do you want from me?”
“You’re one of the captains. Go tell Coach. They shouldn’t give us milk like this. They should be more careful with the athletes’ milk.”
“Back home it’s the blankety-blank water you have to watch,” Kimbrough said.
“Back where I come from it’s the water and the milk,” Raymond said.
“This is shitpiss,” Jessup said. “This is the worst-ass milk I ever tasted.”
Kimbrough drank from his little carton.
“I’ll tell you something,” he said. “This milk is putrid.”
“Damnright,” Jessup said.
“This milk is contaminated. It’s putrid. It’s the worst I ever tasted. Back up home it’s the water. Here I guess it’s the milk. I’ll be sure and tell Coach.”
“Toony, what was the point you were trying to make?” I said.
“The level of deemed merit,” Raymond said. “Assessed value. Imputed market prices. Munitions. Maximized comparative risk.”
Onan Moley joined us. He was wearing a sweat shirt with a screaming eagle, the team symbol, pictured across the front. The word SACRIFICE was inscribed beneath the eagle. Onan hunched his shoulders and lowered his head almost to table level before speaking.
“There’s a lot of talk about a lot of things.”
“What talk?” Kimbrough said.
“Never mind.”
“I’m co-captain, Onan. I’ve got a pipeline. But I don’t know about any talk. Now what talk do you mean?”
“There might be a queer on the squad.”
“Offense or defense,” Kimbrough said.
Terry Madden seated himself at the end of the table. He broke a roll and began to butter it.
“What’s the good word?” he said.
Jessup read aloud from his textbook on monolithic integrated circuitry.
“The pattern match begins with a search for a substring of a given string that has a specified structure in the string-manipulation language.”
Taft Robinson was sitting three tables away. I took my dessert over. He looked up, nodded, then looked down again and sliced a quivering ribbon of fat off the last piece of sirloin on his plate.
“That weak-side sweep looked good today,” I said. “I finally got in a good block for you.”
“I saw it,” he said.
“I wiped out that bastard Smee. He likes to hurt people, that son of a bitch.”
“Which one is he?”
“Middle linebacker. He’s the defensive cap
tain. He captains the defense.”
“I saw the block,” Taft said.
“I really wiped him out, that bastard. Hey, look, what are you doing here anyway?”
“Where — here?”
“Right,” I said. “Here in this particular locale. This dude ranch.”
“I’m here to play football. Same as you.”
“You could be at almost any school in the country. Why would you want to leave a place like Columbia to come here? Granted, Columbia’s not exactly a football colossus. But to come here. How the hell did you let Creed talk you into this place? It’s not as though you’re integrating the place. Technically you’re integrating the place but that’s only because nobody else ever wanted to come here. Who the hell would want to come to a place like this?”
“You came here.”
“Hey, Robinson,” Kimbrough said.
“I’m here because I’m a chronic ballbreaker. First, it’s not likely any other school would have me. Second, I wanted to disappear.”
“But you’re here,” he said. “We’re all here.”
“I can’t argue with that. How’s your milk? Jessup says the milk is putrid.”
“Which one is he?”
“Hey, Robinson,” Moody Kimbrough said. “We don’t wear sunglasses indoors around here. We don’t do that — hear?”
“Mind your own business,” I said.
I watched him coming toward our table. I thought briefly about the fact that he outweighed me by forty pounds or so. Then I got up and hit him in the stomach. He made a noise, an abrupt burp, and hit me in roughly the same spot. I sat down and tried to breathe. When I raised my head finally, Taft was just finishing his dessert.
